Blood Spells n-5

by Jessica Andersen

  No!

  The Triad magic poured into Iago and the green-eyed darkness within him. Rabbit saw it, felt it, through their mind-link. And he got it.

  Oh, holy shit. Iago was using the Triad magic to gain control over the demon king, Moctezuma.

  Fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuckfuckfuck. For a paralyzed, pussy-assed second Rabbit couldn’t think, couldn’t react, couldn’t do anything.

  Then, deep inside him, a spark of fire magic kindled. It was his first and strongest talent, the one he’d done the most damage with. Now it took on a mind of its own, growing from an ember to a blaze, then to a conflagration. The flames seared him, tore at him, then curled into an alien shape, something he hadn’t conjured, didn’t control.

  Oh, gods. Oh, shit. It was the firebird.

  The sun god’s emissary shrieked a shrill battle cry within Rabbit’s mind, trailing flames from its wings as it attacked Iago’s mind-link, tearing at the dark magic with its beak and talons.

  As it did so, it summoned the Triad magic. The power leaped out of Iago and funneled back up the hell-link to pour into the firebird, which began to glow and pulse with the recaptured energy.

  No! Iago’s rage flared through Rabbit, edged with the luminous green of demon vision. Tentacles of greasy brown magic lashed the god-ghost, only to wither and die when they made contact. The firebird’s body shone brilliantly, going almost pure white as the last of the Triad magic left Iago.

  With a trumpeting battle cry, the firebird launched itself out of the hell-link, which collapsed behind it, cutting off the telepathic connection without warning.

  Agony slashed through Rabbit’s skull as Iago’s claws tore out of his consciousness, but that pain was welcome. The pain racing from his head and heart, outward, and then in again to concentrate in his chest, wasn’t.

  No, he shouted inwardly, reaching for the firebird. Wait. I can—

  New pain cracked through his skull, a wordless lash of rejection that his heart translated as, You had your chance, half blood.

  Power thundered and the firebird disappeared, taking the Triad magic with it.

  And Rabbit was suddenly alone in his head once more.

  Gods! His eyes snapped open; his mouth worked with a silent scream as he returned to full consciousness, senses reeling. He was on his knees, clutching his nahwal’s hand, screaming aloud as a cloud of red-gold power erupted from his chest and the firebird took form once again, back-winging away from him, eyes blazing with rage.

  “Wait!” Heart hammering, he lunged for the apparition. “I can handle it. I can—” But it was too late. The firebird gave a trumpeting scream, locked on to the man beside him, and dove.

  It hit Brandt chest high. And disappeared.

  Oh, shit. That was the only thought Brandt could formulate as agony hammered into his chest and red-

  gold power poured liquid fire into his veins, bloating his head and heart.

  Oh, shit. He’d been nailed by a Triad ricochet.

  Oh, shit. It hurt.

  Oh, shit. What the hell was he supposed to do now? What—

  Power exploded at the place where he and his nahwal were joined, searing his hand and sending currents of fire racing up his arm. Pain lanced through his chest and his heart skipped a beat; he’d heard the expression before, but he hadn’t really understood the dissonance of the off-kilter thudda-

  thudda until then.

  Despair tore his soul as his nahwal moved, not away, but into him, aligning itself so its front was to his back. He felt the chill of its flesh, the flow of ichor beneath its skin as its form overlapped with his, suffusing him with a clammy chill and an awful sense of invasion.

  He heard Patience call his name in a raw, frantic voice. He wanted to reach for her, wanted to make everything better. But he couldn’t.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he rasped, the words setting his throat aflame. “I wish—” But he didn’t get to finish, because the Triad magic rose up like the cold, unforgiving water of an ice-fed river. And sucked him down.

  “Brandt!” The name tore from Patience’s throat as his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed into the fog.

  Yanking away from her nahwal, she dropped to her knees and scrambled to find him through blinding tears and the knee-deep mist. She found a leg first, followed it up to his armored torso and higher, to his throat, where she tried to find a pulse. Couldn’t.

  “He’s not dead. Not dead. Can’t be dead.” She repeated it over and over, babbling the words in a litany, petrified that if she stopped, he’d be dead. One dead, one mad, one survivor. Gods, let him be the survivor. Suddenly nothing else mattered.

  She fought the ground’s squishy roll as she hauled his upper body up across her knees, trying to get his head above the level of the mist. He was deadweight, limp and entirely unmoving, his skin cool and cast the same gray green as the world around them.

  But then she felt a flutter under her fingertips. Another. He had a pulse. And he was breathing, though the moves were weak. She shuddered with relief, ready to take whatever little she could get.

  “He’s not dead,” she said to the others, who had gathered close. Tears dripped from her face onto his, adding to the moisture of the mist, as she bent over him, touching his face, his neck, his damp hair.

  Rabbit had pulled Strike off to one side, and was telling him something in a low, broken voice. She caught Iago’s name, but couldn’t think about that right now. Her entire being, both woman and warrior, was focused on Brandt.

  He was alive, but only barely.

  “Wake up,” she whispered, taking his hand in hers and forming a blood-link. “Please wake up.” She opened herself to him, offering him all the magic and strength she had left to give.

  The connection formed on her end, but nothing happened on his.

  Sick nerves drilled through her. “He’s not responding.”

  “He is trapped inside the Triad magic,” a multitonal voice answered.

  Patience’s head jerked up. Her nahwal stood there staring down at her. It was the only one left; the other ancestral beings had disappeared.

  “Trapped how?” she demanded, heart thudding.

  “The Triad magic cannot speak to the eagle until he makes peace with his ancestors.” The nahwal seemed to be speaking from rote, its expression blank. But for a second she thought she caught a glimpse of something more.

  The creature had spoken to her only twice before, and both messages had been frustratingly vague.

  She hadn’t made much of an effort to improve the connection through ancestor worship, preferring to focus on the living. Now that was coming back to bite her in the ass.

  It was too late to fix that now, though. All she could do was try to reach that spark of humanity, the hint that someone—some one—in there was trying to get through to her. “Please tell me how to help him,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “Please. I’ll do anything.” Almost.

  “You must help him become a Triad mage before the solstice-eclipse. The lost jaguar and the serpent have long, dangerous roads to travel, and he is the only one who can prevent Cabrakan from avenging his brother’s death at the hands of Kali’s children.”

  The nahwal took a step back, away from the group. Patience would have gone after the creature, but Brandt’s heavy body weighed her down. “What am I supposed to do?” Her voice broke. “Tell me.”

  “Take him home.” The nahwal’s form blurred as the gray-green mist closed around it. “Help him remember the debt he owes.” Another step.

  “Wait!” She stretched out her hand. “Don’t . . .” She trailed off as it vanished. Reeling, she looked up at her teammates, whose expressions ranged from concern to gray-faced shock. “What the hell is it talking about?”

  It was her nahwal, her message. But it was Strike who said in a ragged voice, “The lost jaguar and the serpent have to be Anna and Mendez. The other two firebirds must have gone to earth.” Which so wasn’t good news. Anna didn’t want anything to do wit
h the Nightkeepers anymore, and Mendez was a rogue mage, a loose cannon who’d spent most of the past three years behind bars.

  “Why the hell would the god pick them?” Nate asked. “For that matter, why did it go for Brandt if he can’t complete the spell?” He locked on Patience, expression grim. “What debt was it talking about?”

  She wanted to weep and rage, wanted to curl in a ball and pretend the last ten minutes hadn’t happened. But that was the woman she had been, not the one she was now.

  Focus. Prioritize. Her warrior’s buffer might not be as strong as Brandt’s, but it would be strong enough. It would have to be. Calling on it to stem the panic and pump determination in its place, she tightened her grip on him. “I don’t know about any debt. But I’m damn well going to figure it out.”

  She had already been forced to say good-bye to her sons and winikin. She wasn’t letting go of her husband without a fight.

  Skywatch The magi materialized in the sunken center of the mansion’s great room, in a big open space surrounded by wide, low-slung leather couches and ottomans. In the kitchen area that opened off the upper level of the two-level room, Jox, Leah, and Lucius were sitting at the marble-topped breakfast bar, waiting for news.

  They were up and moving before the ’port magic had cleared, but faltered when they saw that Michael and Nate were carrying Brandt’s motionless body between them.

  Jox headed for Patience. In his midsixties, fit, and trim, with long gray hair that he wore back in a Deadhead ponytail, the royal winikin was responsible for protecting and guiding several of the magi as well as running the day-to-day operations of the entire compound. Yet despite his already heavy workload, he had unofficially adopted Patience when her winikin, Hannah, had left with the twins.

  “What happened?” he demanded as he ran a quick vitals check on Brandt, who was deathly pale and cool to the touch, his lips dusky, almost blue.

  The walls of the high-ceilinged great room seemed to press in on her, but she fought the panic and made herself be strong, made her voice stay steady when she answered, “The god chose Rabbit first, but when the power flux woke Iago, the Triad magic bounced out of Rabbit and into Brandt. Now, according to my nahwal, he’s trapped in the spell because he can’t connect with his ancestors until I help him remember some debt he hasn’t repaid. If we can’t wake him before the solstice-eclipse, we’re screwed. And Anna and Mendez are Triad numbers two and three.” Like ripping off a wax strip, she said it all at once, quickly, to get the pain over with.

  Only this pain was just beginning, wasn’t it?

  “Gods.” Jox’s face lost all its color. “Anna.”

  “Yeah,” Strike grated. Leah stood beside him, gripping his upper arm in support. He said, “I’ll make the calls. We need to know if they’re—well. We need to know.”

  As Strike and Leah headed for the nearest phone, Jox pokered up and went into crisis-response mode, though Patience could see the effort it cost him.

  She could relate.

  Moving to the nearest intercom, the winikin keyed the button that would transmit his voice throughout the compound. “The away team’s back. All hands on deck in the great room, ASAP.” Then he said to Nate and Michael, “Help Patience get Brandt bedded down.” To her, he said, “I’ll send someone with an IV setup for him and food for you.” The magi all needed to rest and refuel after the amount of magic they had just pulled.

  His orders were practical, a veneer of necessity slapped over a deep layer of shock. But that was what the Nightkeepers did, wasn’t it? They took what the gods threw at them, dealt with the bad stuff, fought the battles that needed fighting, and lived their lives in between crises.

  Or tried to, anyway.

  Focus, Patience told herself. Make a plan. This wasn’t a physical enemy she could fight, but she still needed a strategy. “Let’s hold off on the IV,” she said to Jox. “I’d want to try uplinking and—”

  “Not a chance,” the winikin interrupted. “You need to recharge.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. Promise me you won’t do anything before you’ve at least eaten.”

  “I can’t just sit here.”

  “You won’t be any good to him if you crap out in the middle of the uplink.”

  “I’ll help,” a new voice interjected. Patience turned to find Lucius standing behind her. He was pure human, but he was also their Prophet, endowed with the magical ability to search their ancestors’ library for spells and answers. Although the magic had made him nearly as big and strong as a Nightkeeper male, his half-untucked T-shirt, finger-tunneled sandy hair, and ratty sandals reminded her of the geeky grad student he’d been when he first arrived.

  Oddly, that small piece of continuity in the middle of chaos helped center her. Inhaling a breath that was too close to tears, she nodded. “Thanks. What did you have in mind?”

  “Jade said the nahwal mentioned a couple of gods, Kali and Cabrakan. I’ll pull together info on both of them. But I was also thinking I could try to find a reboot spell, something that could get a mage out of misfired magic. Maybe we can reach Brandt that way.”

  Patience’s chest loosened a little at the reminder that even though the nahwal had said she had to be the one to bring Brandt back, she wasn’t entirely on her own. “That’d be good. And maybe look for a memory-enhancing spell.”

  “Right. Any ideas what the nahwal was talking about Brandt having forgotten?”

  Disquiet tightened her stomach. “I can only think of one thing that neither of us can remember.”

  Lucius snapped his fingers, making the connection. “The night you met.”

  “Yeah.” They had both been down in the Yucatán for spring break and awakened in bed together the morning after the equinox with no memory of what had happened the night before. Later, it had become obvious that they hadn’t met by chance. Instead, they had somehow connected with the magic more than four years before the barrier fully reactivated. And they didn’t have the faintest clue what had happened that night.

  The Nightkeepers and winikin had thrown around various theories, but those discussions had dwindled over time because the “where, how, why” of their marriage hadn’t seemed all that important in the larger scheme.

  It did now, though. What had happened that night? What debt did he owe? And how the hell was she supposed to help him remember anything if he was trapped in the Triad spell?

  “I’ll see what I can find.” Lucius pointed toward the residential wing. “Now go. Eat. Sleep. I’ll call you when I’ve got something.”

  She meant to rest; she really did. But once she was alone in the suite, with Brandt stripped down to a black tee and bike shorts, lying too still beneath the blue coverlet of the bed they had once shared, she couldn’t settle. Instead, she found herself pacing the five-room suite, glancing at the framed pictures that were hung on nearly every wall.

  Some were of just her and Brandt—a few candids and a posed portrait from their small wedding.

  Others were of the family foursome: her and Brandt with the newborn twins; the four of them out in front of the starter house they had bought right before Strike had called them back to Skywatch. A few showed just the boys: Braden feeding a brown nanny goat while Harry hid behind Brandt’s jean-clad leg; Braden playing on an inflatable moon-bounce while Harry stood off to the side with a look of intense concentration on his face, as if trying to figure out how the thing worked. There was even one from Skywatch, an extended family portrait with the four of them, plus Hannah, Woody, and Rabbit.

  But where those pictures were familiar, when she stalled in the bedroom door, the man she saw lying in the big bed looked like a stranger.

  She wished she knew what she could have done differently. She had resented the hell out of him for backing Strike’s decision to send the boys away and then distancing himself when she had wanted—

  needed—to talk it through. And when, in the worst of her depression, she had gone behind his back to break into the royal
quarters in search of a clue to the boys’ whereabouts, Brandt might have alibied her when Strike and Leah had caught her coming out of their suite, but later, in private, he had turned away from her. And stayed gone.

  Now, as she stared at his motionless form, the nahwal ’s words echoed in her mind: Help him remember. But how?

  Giving in to the impulse, freed by the knowledge that there wasn’t anybody there who would hit her with a derisive snort or eye-roll, she pulled a small deck of oracle cards from the pocket of her combat pants, where she had carried them for luck. She shuffled them, taking solace in the small action; the cards were one of the few things that belonged only to her these days.

  When the deck felt right, she stopped shuffling, cut the cards, and flipped the bottom one in the quickest and simplest of readings.

  A shiver touched the back of her neck at the sight of a geometric glyph that looked like the outline of two flat-topped, step-sided pyramids that had been joined together at their crowns to form a ragged

  “X” shape.

  It was etznab, the mirror glyph . . . and the harbinger of unfinished business.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In the pitch of night in the middle of freaking nowhere, a mangled streetlight hung off the bridge at a crazy angle, shining on a busted-through guardrail that dangled down to touch the cold black river.

  The light was getting smaller by the second, though, as the wrecked, once-classic Beemer traveled downstream, sinking as water gushed through the punched-out windshield to fill the empty front seats.

  Strapped into the back, eighteen-year-old Brandt tore at his seat belt, which was jammed tight, hung up on the crumpled door on one side, just fucking stuck on the other. The driver’s seat was off-kilter and shoved up against his shins, trapping his legs, one of which hurt like hell, even through the numbing cold.

  He shouted as loud as he could: “Joe! Dewey! Anybody! For fuck’s sake, help !”

  There was no answer. Hadn’t been since he’d come to, alone in the car and stuck as shit.